Mark Mellman

If President Obama’s State of the Union address lived up to its advanced billing, you will have heard a lot of tax talk Tuesday night. Polls suggest the issue does…

Pollsters and pundits spend lots of time studying margins — how far ahead or behind a given candidate is relative to his or her opponent. Focusing on margins is a…

People should be accountable for what they write. As a graduate student, I spent far too many hours in a dank and darkened room with a TV set and a…

If I were President Obama, I’d be enormously frustrated. The actual President Obama may be frustrated, too. After all, the country has created more than 200,000 jobs each month for…

I’ll have more to say about November’s elections in the coming weeks as additional numbers are crunched. In the meantime, what we can learn from President Obama’s immigration announcement and…

Democrats’ economic agenda fared far better than Democratic candidates on Election Day. Minimum wage increases garnered big majorities in Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota as voters were pummeling Democratic…

The first key to understanding Tuesday’s elections is recognizing that it was a midterm cycle. The party controlling the White House typically loses seats in midterms. In recent decades, those…

The poll was called “humiliating,” “a whopper for the ages,” a “disgrace” — I said it may have been right, at the time it was done. Five months ago, everyone…

Two weeks ago, a dinner guest intimately familiar with biohazards explained the irony of the white, full-body suits healthcare workers treating Ebola have been wearing on our TV screens. Studies…

Last week I argued that people who aren’t busy over-interpreting political forecasting models are under-appreciating their meaning and import. Models are, by definition, simplifications of reality and are necessarily incomplete.…